In Photos: PETA’s Care Divas

PETA’s Care Divas couldn’t have come back to the stage at a more relevant time.

Hilarious and heartwarming, Care Divas is a gut-wrenching and bittersweet story about five gay overseas Filipino workers based in Israel who work as caregivers in the morning and transform into glamorous drag queens at night.

Director’s Notes: Maribel Legarda

PETA Kicks off its 50th year celebration with the bittersweet laughter, high energy songs and bright colors of CareDivas. This production was originally produced in 2011 for our 43rd theater season.

Coming from a long history of making plays on gender I thought that maybe it was time to try a little “experiment”, two women took the helm of writing and directing. Liza Magtoto as the playwright and myself as director. Lest you think it is out of sheer vanity let me say I was curious to breakdown gender boundaries in artistic creation. Through all of PETA’s gender based plays, gay playwrights have written gay plays, women playwrights women plays and same for directing. I wanted to tweak our creative process and hopefully learn something new.

Liza has written a very filmic play so as to move from scene to another as if there were dissolves and cuts a continuous flow. This became a major motif in the direction and design style. The stage is like a neutral canvas that changes with very minimal sets and props and the actors play an important role in defining space and scene. I have also chosen to work with a small cast of ten highly talented actors who fill the canvass with intense, dynamic, and joyful performances. Vincent De Jesus’ original songs weaves through the narrative as the other “text” that embodies the romantic and whimsy of this play.

Caredivas is not a story of epic proportions. It is a story that spans roughly a year and focuses on a small seemingly insignificant community of Filipino overseas workers that find a way to survive and thrive through friendships and an opportunity of personal expression through in their creative performances.

This production is more than just a gay play for me. It is a story of migration and how the dark, dirty, and dangerous work that will be encountered by a majority of overseas Filipino workers can, in the hands of a resilient and loving people be turned into a life
filled with camaraderie, adventure, and passion.